Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land

By Norman Wirzba

This refreshing work offers a distinctly agrarian reframing of spiritual practices to address today’s most pressing social and ecological concerns.

For thousands of years most human beings drew their daily living from, and made sense of their lives in reference to, the land. Growing and finding food, along with the multiple practices of home maintenance and the cultivations of communities, were the abiding concerns that shaped what people understood about and expected from life. In Agrarian Spirit, Norman Wirzba demonstrates how agrarianism is of vital and continuing significance for spiritual life today. Far from being the exclusive concern of a dwindling number of farmers, this book shows how agrarian practices are an important corrective to the political and economic policies that are doing so much harm to our society and habitats. It is an invitation to the personal transformation that equips all people to live peaceably and beautifully with each other and the land.

Agrarian Spirit begins with a clear and concise affirmation of creaturely life. Wirzba shows that a human life is inextricably entangled with the lives of fellow animals and plants, and that individual flourishing must always include the flourishing of the habitats that nourish and sustain our life together. The book explores how agrarian sensibilities and responsibilities transform the practices of prayer, perception, mystical union, humility, gratitude, and hope. Wirzba provides an elegant and compelling account of spiritual life that is both attuned to ancient scriptural sources and keyed to addressing the pressing social and ecological concerns of today. Scholars and students of theology, ecotheology, and spirituality, as well as readers interested in agrarian and environmental studies, will gain much from this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780268203085

Norman Wirzba

Norman Wirzba is the Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Christian Theology at Duke Divinity School and senior fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. He is the author and editor of sixteen books, including This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World.

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ADVANCE PRAISE

for

Agrarian Spirit

Norman Wirzba has done it again: this is—literally and figuratively—the most grounded (and grounding) book I’ve read in a long age. It will lead you to contemplation, and then, if you’re lucky, to change.—Bill McKibben, author of The Comforting Whirlwind

Norman Wirzba traces, in bold compelling strokes, the difference between the world taken as creation to be inhabited in gratitude and as nature to be exploited in greed, the difference between the world as commodity and the world as relationship. In the context of that difference he explores specific hands-on practices and disciplines that make it possible to live as a soilembracing creature of God outside the grasp of an anti-creation economy of greed. This welcome book offers transformative energy and courage for a different way of living.—Walter Brueggemann, author of A Wilderness Zone

"Agrarian Spirit is a beautiful consideration of what it means to be interdependent and embodied. Wirzba opens up the possibilities of stewardship and care to all humans living in community, no matter their locale or vocation, and roots the truths of an agrarian faith in the example of Christ."—Grace Olmstead, author of Uprooted

If ‘incarnate spirituality’ sounds like an oxymoron to you, let Norman Wirzba be your guide to the agrarian arts of faith. This book is the culmination of decades of thinking and writing and work, and there is no writer better equipped to articulate how an agrarian sensibility should shape our spiritual practices.—Jeffrey Bilbro, author of Reading the Times and editor-in-chief at Front Porch Republic

"Agrarian Spirit isn’t luddite, nostalgic, or angry. Rather, it is a gentle, wise, and hopeful call forward, casting a vision for how to live as God’s people in God’s world. I loved this book, and it flooded my imagination with pictures of what the Kingdom of Heaven could be, right now, right in my neighborhood."—Andrew Peterson, author of The God of the Garden

This lovely book is full of invigorating surprises. For the many of us who don’t live on farms, Wirzba’s reflections offer an invitation to reclaim in practical ways our relationship with the earth and its creatures who, with us, depend on all that has been entrusted to us for stewardship, for sharing, and for grateful enjoyment.—Marilyn McEntyre, author of Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies

What ails us most is not susceptible of mere technological remediation, which by now has become an expensive enterprise in endless and ineffectual tinkering. Our most serious problems run much deeper, and they require the diagnostic and prescriptive powers of a mind at once capacious, clear, and reverent—a mind such as we see at work here. This would merely be a fine book were it not also a necessary one.—Jason Peters, author of The Culinary Plagiarist

"Incisive in its critical analysis, Agrarian Spirit is inspirational in how it opens up renewed possibilities of collective flourishing in our wounded world."—Kate Rigby, author of Reclaiming Romanticism

"With uncommon depth and breadth, Norman Wirzba’s Agrarian Spirit urges us to embrace and celebrate human and non-human creatures as cobecoming, embodied expressions of God’s creating and sustaining love. He urges us to acknowledge our self-insufficiency and our dependence on others as a gift and as a challenge to develop the nurturing relationships that can heal our world and inspire our hope."—Steve Bell, author of the Pilgrim Year book series

"Norman Wirzba’s agrarian spiritual exercises reposition us ‘down and among’ all living things, close to the God who sustains the life of every creature. Agrarian Spirit renews our desire to make a home in this world and to keep faith with the generations coming after us."—Stephanie Paulsell, co-editor of Goodness and the Literary Imagination

AGRARIAN SPIRIT

AGRARIAN

SPIRIT

CULTIVATING FAITH, COMMUNITY,

AND THE LAND

NORMAN WIRZBA

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

All Rights Reserved

Published by the University of Notre Dame Press

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022935746

ISBN: 978-0-268-20309-2 (Hardback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20311-5 (WebPDF)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20308-5 (Epub)

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

For Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, Fred Kirschenmann,

Vandana Shiva, Gene Logsdon (‡), and Ellen Davis

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

PART I. AGRARIAN FUNDAMENTALS

ONE On Not Losing Creation

TWO Why Agrarian?

THREE Placing the Soul

PART II. AGRARIAN SPIRITUAL EXERCISES

FOUR Learning to Pray

FIVE Learning to See

SIX Learning Descent

SEVEN Learning Humility

EIGHT Learning Generosity

NINE Learning to Hope

Notes

Scripture Index

General Index

PREFACE

The God of scripture is an agrarian God. This does not mean that God hates cities or shuns wilderness. Instead, it means that God’s reality is constantly revealed in the divine power that creates, sustains, nurtures, liberates, empowers, and heals the world. These are each agrarian ways of being that have as their goal the flourishing of all creaturely life, for it is precisely in each creature realizing its unique potential that God is glorified. What we do not see in scripture is a God who mines, clear-cuts, commodifies, abuses, or abandons creatures. Put another way, the God at work in Israel’s history, become incarnate in Jesus, and made abidingly present in the Holy Spirit manifests ways of being that are strikingly at odds with the economic policies and political priorities that define our modern world.

Throughout scripture God is often characterized as a gardener, farmer, shepherd, and carpenter. Of course, none of these characterizations exhaust the depth of God’s ways with the world, but what they communicate is that in God’s estimation nothing is more fundamental or important than to nurture the life that nurtures us. The knowledge and the skills of nurture, however, which we might also describe as the patient attention that inspires the care of each other, are not easily obtained. They have been eroding for some time as people increasingly, and not through any personal fault of their own, shop and purchase their way through life. The speed and inattention with which many people now move through their days—it is no accident that social scientists refer to our time as the Great Acceleration—indicate that it will take considerable intentional effort and communal support to grow the courtesy and cultivate the kindness that genuine nurture requires.

I believe that agrarian traditions have a great deal to teach us about how to live in this world in ways that honor God’s desire that creatures flourish and flower. Right from the start, scripture invites human beings to participate in God’s gardening ways with the world so as to appreciate life’s fragility and splendor, and its vulnerability and virility. This would be a genuinely grounded spirituality in which the work of one’s hands joins with the life-creating power of God that is always and already at work in forests and fields and active in bees and sheep. It would be our earthy and embodied participation in God’s agrarian Spirit.

There is no shortage of books dealing with spiritual themes and spiritual practices. As I have written Agrarian Spirit, my aim has been to highlight the difference that agrarian ways of thinking, feeling, and working make for how several aspects of a spiritual life are conceived and realized. The chapter on prayer, for instance, does not attempt anything like a thorough examination of this central practice. Instead, it reconsiders the action of praying and its goals in light of agrarian sensibilities. Similarly, the chapter on humility shows how agrarian ways of living with plants and animals can help us understand what humility is about and why it matters. The chapter on descent asks how our thinking about mysticism is transformed when our focus is down and among rather than up and away. My hope is that Agrarian Spirit will help readers think about spiritual practices in a fresh manner.

Agrarian ways of life have been the norm for most people around the world for at least ten thousand years. This means that people made sense of their lives and calibrated their expectations for what life should be in terms of creaturely realities like birth, germination, photosynthesis, fertility, digestion, illness, and death. At their best, agrarian traditions gave people the instruction and the skills they needed to nurture the land and communities that nurtured them. Moreover, we cannot make sense of Jewish and Christian scriptures if we do not attend to and appreciate the embodied entanglements with soils, waters, plants, animals, and weather that shaped how Jews and Christians thought about themselves and about God. The entanglements are fundamental, and they abide. It cannot be stressed enough that there is no human life apart from them, which is why scripture speaks repeatedly of the human need to care for each other, fellow creatures, and the land.

I believe that an agrarian development of spiritual practices is crucial in this Anthropocene epoch when the dominant economic and political policies of our time are rendering so much of this planet uninhabitable and so many of its (human and nonhuman) creatures expendable. The definitive marker of an agrarian is not being a farmer but being committed to the flourishing of people, fellow creatures, and the land altogether. As such, agrarians are also committed to spiritual practices that are at once embodied, social, and economic and are focused on the healing of the earth that God has only and always loved.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have happened without the support of Stephen Wrinn, director at the University of Notre Dame Press. Steve has been a friend and trusted colleague for nearly twenty years. Over that time he has encouraged good writing and thinking about agrarian themes and has made it his mission to promote excellent books that address the pressing needs of our time. The publishing world is a better place because of his influence. I should also say that this book would have been inconceivable to me apart from the friendship, first of Wendell Berry, and then of the many agrarian writers he introduced me to, most notably Wes Jackson, Vandana Shiva, Fred Kirschenmann, and Gene Logsdon. Ellen Davis became an invaluable companion and colleague shortly thereafter, and I am grateful for her insights and continuing support along the way. Together they have taught me more than I can say. I am grateful for their friendship and wisdom. And special thanks to Nathaniel Lo for preparing the index.

I was raised on a farm in southern Alberta, even made plans to become a farmer myself. Though I was immersed in farm work from an early age, it took my agrarian friends to show me, several years later, that something like agrarian philosophy or agrarian theology is even possible. They have helped me understand why and how agricultural life can be a powerful lens through which to frame and assess life’s most important questions. Agrarianism is not a niche topic or occupation that is of concern only to the ever-dwindling number of farmers that remain. It is a culture in the full sense of the term because it holds up a comprehensive vision for how people might live responsibly and beautifully in their places and with each other.

PART I

Agrarian Fundamentals

CHAPTER ONE

On Not Losing Creation

Every existing thing is equally upheld in its existence by God’s creative love. The friends of God should love him to the point of merging their love into his with regard to all things here below.

—Simone Weil

An agrarian-informed faith hinges on the assumption that this world and its life are sacred gifts of God that are meant to be cherished and celebrated. This sounds straightforward enough until one realizes how many spiritualities have been, and continue to be, premised on the exact opposite assumption. These spiritualities, though sometimes waxing eloquent about the beauties of this world, are fundamentally dualistic or gnostic. What I mean is that they assume materiality and embodiment to be deficient, and thus a lower order of reality that must ultimately be left behind, if not destroyed altogether. It’s as if God made a mistake in creating creatures that are finite, fallible, and marked by need. The focus of these spiritualities is the ethereal human soul, and the point of their prescribed spiritual practices is to liberate the soul from places and bodies that are variously described as fleeting, frustrating, or foul. Heavenly bliss can’t be here or in this life. It is somewhere else, waiting to be entered after we die.

I believe all of this to be a massive mistake, a catastrophe really, because it despises what should be the unending source of our care, devotion, and delight. To understand why I believe this, it is important to lay out in clear and succinct terms what it means to affirm this world and its life as created by God. Again, one might suppose that all sorts of people affirm a divinely created world. Ask people what they think of when they think of God and they will often say that God is the Creator, the Supreme Being who made it all a long, long time ago. But if you ask what their affirmation means for their thinking about their bodies, neighborhoods, and watersheds, or how this thinking translates into specific economic and political policies, the responses either trail off or become so vague as to be useless. In other words, the idea of creation may have something to say about when or how it all began, but not very much about the practices and policies that order this life here and now. How else should we explain the contradiction in which people affirm God as the Creator while consenting to the destruction of what God creates and daily sustains?

What difference does it make to affirm this world as created by God?

The idea that the places of this life are created by God rests on the conviction that every created thing—ranging from soils, waters, and clouds to earthworms, fish, and people—is loved by God. There isn’t a single creature that has to exist or is the source of its own being. That anything exists at all is because God wants it to be. If God did not love for something other than God to be, and then make room for it and nurture it, nothing would exist. As the opening poem on creation in scripture (Genesis 1–2:4) sees it, God loves creatures so much that God, while in the midst of creating them, regularly pauses to note how good and fitting their being is. This is a divine love so arresting and profound that it prompts God to observe the first Sabbath, which is the hallowed time to relish and delight in the beauty, fertility, and fecundity of everything around. On that first Sabbath sunrise, when God looks out onto a freshly made world, what God perceives is God’s own love variously made visible, tactile, auditory, fragrant, and nutritious. God’s creative activity, we might say, comes to its fulfillment in the Sabbath rest that is so deeply affirmative and joy-inducing that there simply is no other place that God wants to be.

If what I have said of creation is true, then it is crucial that we appreciate that created beings and places are not simply the focus or object of God’s love and attention. They are also, and in ways we do not fully understand, the material means and the embodied expressions of divine love. In scripture God is often named Emmanuel, God-with-us. Now we can appreciate why. God is forever wanting to be with creatures because they are the embodied sites through which God’s love is always already at work in the world. It may be more accurate to say that God is with and within us, since that does a better job communicating the intimacy of God’s presence in creaturely life. No creature is a random or pointless fluke. No creature has ever been devoid of God’s affirming presence. Instead, every creature is precious, a sacred and gracious gift worthy of our respect and cherishing.

This means that material reality is never to be despised or rejected because in doing so one would also be despising the divine love that is constantly animating and circulating through it. Any and all desires that end with this world being destroyed and left behind are fundamentally confused (at best) or dangerously sick (at worst). Any and all hopes that people might finally escape from this created world to be with God somewhere else are misguided because they forget that this created universe is where God is present and where God’s love is active. If you want to be with God, don’t look up and away to some destination far beyond the blue. Look down and around, because that is where God is at work and where God wants to be. God does not ever flee from creatures. God abides with them as a gardener attends to her garden, preparing the conditions for fruitful life and then staying close in the modes of nurture, protection, and celebration. This is why Simone Weil is right to say that the fundamental human task is to train and join our love with the divine love that daily sustains the life of all the creatures of this earth.

It isn’t hard to sympathize with the yearning to be with God somewhere else. For too many people, life either is or has been made to be difficult, if not unbearable, by innumerable injustices and forms of abandonment. When this earthly life has been made so miserable, the desire to flee from it makes a lot of sense. Even so, this yearning should be resisted because if God is the Source and Sustenance of every place and creature, then God cannot be confined to any circumscribed place, no matter how wonderful or far away. To want to flee from this earth is also to want to flee from where God always, already is. To locate God somewhere else would be to separate God from the very realities that God loves and where God is at work. The truly radical theological claim is that the Creator is constantly present to every creature as its animating power, and that what God most wants for each creature is that it realize whatever potential is uniquely its to achieve. As the great Orthodox theologian Maximus the Confessor once put it, God wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of his embodiment.¹ In other words, the eternal desire of God is that each kind of creature realize to the full all the capacities within it that are made possible by God’s love. The presence of God, we might say, is not ever somewhere else but is, instead, to be found here and now in the material and spiritual realization of life’s abundance.²

What I have been describing will come as a huge disappointment to many people committed to a spiritual life. This is because the idea of the soul’s escape to a disembodied, ethereal elsewhere is so attractive and compelling. But the idea needs to be resisted. Why? Because embodiment is not the problem. If it were, then the eternal, creating Word of God could not have become flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). If every place and every distinct body is the material medium of God’s love, and if our bodies are temples of God’s animating spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19)—sites through which the love of God can be highlighted and spread—then people should, like God, only ever care for, cherish, and celebrate them. One of the clearest indications that embodiment is not the problem can be found in the Christian affirmation (in Colossians 1:15–20) that the fullness of God dwelled bodily in Jesus of Nazareth. Not some fragment or limited degree of God, but the fullness (pleroma as the Greek has it) of God. In this pronouncement we discover that there is nothing about embodiment or the materiality of creation that is in itself an obstacle to God’s presence. Those who claim that embodiment must be overcome and left behind are guilty of what I call a failure of incarnational nerve.

God’s frustration and grief are not with the creaturely condition itself, since, as we have already seen, creatureliness is precisely what God loves and where God’s love is made real. Instead, God’s anger and sorrow are directed at the forces and ways of being that cause creatures to suffer, hunger, or be violated. Injustice, abuse, and neglect are condemned by God precisely because they represent assaults on the integrity and sanctity of the created bodies God loves. As Jesus’s own resurrected life and his bodily ascension reveal, life with God—what often goes under the name of life in heaven—is not closed to embodiment. It is closed only to the destructive ways of being that do bodies harm. In other words, heaven is closed to sin, but it is not closed to embodiment.

This is why it makes little sense to think that heaven is attained by getting to a location somewhere far away. To be in heaven is to be in the places that God loves and to experience God’s love as the only power inspiring and animating the bodies that are there. The aim of a spiritual life, therefore, must always be on refining and making real in this world the divine love that creates, nurtures, and beautifies embodied life. In a stunning passage that should put a stop to all versions of otherworldly flight, scripture ends with God descending to be with creatures in their healed habitats and communities. God’s desire is not to be apart from creatures but to be with them and to make a divine home among mortals (Revelation 21:3). People are fooling themselves (and others) if they think they can enter heaven apart from the exercise of love, because apart from spiritual transformation they will simply take to a new location the destructive habits and practices that do so much harm here. Put another way, heaven is not about one’s transportation to another realm. It is, instead, about the transformation of this life so that God’s love is everywhere incarnate and active. Love alone assures that a place created as paradise is not turned into another hell on earth.

The divine love that creates, sustains, and heals creaturely life is not sentimental or naive. In large part this is because God’s love is not coercive or constraining. From the start, God gives to creatures the freedom to become themselves. No creature is simply the passive recipient of its life: it also plays an active role in the furtherance of its own life and the life all around it. As the Genesis creation poem puts it, God creates a vibrant world in which creatures bring forth new life and explore possibilities that have not yet been realized. In this dynamic world, fertility and fecundity are clear results and are evidenced in the beauty of the diversity of life forms that populate Earth. But so too are suffering and pain, as creaturely freedoms and finitudes collide. Being with others, even in the best of circumstances, often results in frustration and harm. This is why love’s work is work that calls for the disciplines of attention, patience, repentance, gentleness, humility, and mercy. The crucial effort is the sympathetic one that comes alongside fellow creatures and is committed to places in modalities of respect and care. Knowing how often the intention to care brings about harm, confession of wrongdoing is love’s steadfast accompaniment.

We live in a world much abused and deeply wounded by us. It has, to use the words of the apostle Paul (in Romans 8), been subjected to futility owing to human waywardness and the refusal by people to live into their creaturely condition. As a result, the whole of creation is waiting for the true followers of God to come forth and live in ways that promote creaturely freedom and flourishing. This is what agrarian faith is fundamentally about. The spirituality that I develop in this book is not ethereal, otherworldly, or disembodied. Instead, it is fully incarnate and deeply rooted in the being of soils and neighborhoods, and the lives of chickens and children. It focuses on and develops the embodied, communal, and economic practices that draw us more intimately into life with others and, in doing that, also more practically into life with God.

As I develop what agrarian faith looks like, it is important to note that theologians have traditionally distinguished between two expressions of faith: fides qua and fides quae. The former refers to the habits and practices—what some writers refer to as spiritual exercises—that cultivate trust in and love of God: the ways of faith.³ The latter refers to the beliefs and doctrines that help people organize their thinking about God: the teachings of the faith. These two should be viewed as mutually illuminating, rather than as in conflict with each other. Even so, in this book my focus will be primarily on the practices and dispositions that people should cultivate to participate in God’s gardening and farming ways with the world. My hope is that, as I foreground several spiritual exercises and then develop them in an agrarian way, fresh insight into the life of God and this world may emerge, and people will be better positioned to witness to and participate in the love of God circulating through all of it.

If God is the primordial and essential Agrarian—the One who creates and sustains the world by planting, gardening, farming, and shepherding life—and if a spiritual practice refers to a person’s growing (yet always imperfect) participation in God’s ways of being with creatures, then the cultivation of distinctly agrarian spiritual exercises becomes a matter of the greatest social, practical, and theological significance.

CHAPTER TWO

Why Agrarian?

The demographic trends of the last several decades suggest that a book Agrarian Spirit is out of step with the times. Urbanization is now a global phenomenon, with the dawn of the twenty-first century marking the first time when more people live in cities than live in rural or wild places. The pace and extent of urban development have grown dramatically as farmers and peasants, many of them facing hostile economic and political forces, leave climate-stressed and violence-stricken lands in search of shelter, employment, and subsistence. The cities that receive them often lack the infrastructure—the housing, education, medical, and support services—necessary to provide for their needs. By the year 2050 it is expected that more than two-thirds of all people will live in cities, with several of these residing in high-density megacities with populations in the tens of millions. Of these residents, one in three will live in slums. By contrast, in the year 1800 less than 10 percent of people across the globe lived in urban centers.¹

There is considerable debate about how best to contrast an urban versus a rural environment, with scholars contesting the definitions and characteristics of each. What is clear, however, is that the movement from country to city entails much more than a change in location. More fundamental are the changes in sensibilities and responsibilities that often accompany relocation and that affect how people think and feel about their world and their place within it. Never before have so many people lived in ways that require little or no understanding of their embodied dependence on the land, its waters and weather, and all the diverse microbial, plant, and animal life they support. Can people care for and protect what they know little about?

For millennia, hunters, fishers, foragers, peasants, and farmers have worked out their lives in terms of what soils, watersheds, plants, animals, and weather made possible. To survive, let alone to live well, the vast majority of people needed to hone their sympathies and calibrate their desires to the habits and fertility cycles of animals, the germination, growth, and maturation of plants, the seasons of the year, and the movements of water. To do that, they needed to study what their places and fellow creatures allowed and then develop the practical skills to work within ecologically determined limits and possibilities. They didn’t always do it well, but sometimes they succeeded in developing the economies that did not violate or